But other reports of gold trickled in from the mainland. Native people gave gold dust to the chief trader of Fort Kamloops, Donald McLean, in 1852, and four years later he reported that he had accumulated two bottles half full of Thompson River gold. Samples reached Victoria and in about 1857, “Governor [James] Douglas at the mess table shewed us a few grains of scale gold . . . This was the first gold I saw and probably the first that arrived here.” According to the writer, Dr. John Helmcken: “The Governor attached great importance to it and thought that it meant change and a busy time . . . [with] Victoria rising to a great city.” However, most residents reacted with skepticism and less excitement, thinking the governor was promoting “a sort of advertisement for ‘town lots’.”
They would be shaken from such complacency very rapidly after the Hudson’s Bay Company sent eight hundred ounces of gold to San Francisco for assaying a year later and whispers of northern gold turned into the shout of “Gold on the Frazer.” Miners dreamed again of fortunes. Men everywhere clamoured for information about this new goldfield. This confluence of events produced the flood of people that deluged Fort Victoria in the spring of 1858.
Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, a Hudson’s Bay Company physician and adviser of Governor James Douglas.
Alfred Waddington, a San Francisco merchant who hurried to establish a branch of his wholesale grocery firm in Victoria, commented that the “proximity of Victoria to San Francisco . . . afforded every facility, and converted the matter into a fifteen dollar trip. Steamers and sailing vessels were put in requisition, and old ships and tubs of every description [became] actively employed in bringing up passengers.”
An artist’s rendering of Victoria, c. 1860.
Alfred Waddington.
Another commentator, R.M. Ballantyne, drew a vivid picture of these ships and their passengers. “A steamer calculated to carry 600 passengers,” he wrote, “is laden with 1,600. There is hardly standing room on the deck. It is almost impossible to clear passage from one part of the vessel to the other. . . . Their object is of the earth, earthly-wealth in its rawest and rudest form — gold, the one thing for which they bear to live, or dare to die.” In their haste to reach the fabulous wealth of the Fraser and Thompson rivers, prospectors stripped stores of provisions. Whether anyone liked it or not, the secret was out and another gold rush on.
In some people’s eyes, the forty-niners of California had achieved bogeyman status. Their exploits and behaviour were legendary, and people of many countries looked upon them as brutal, lawless, vicious, and wild. Armed with guns and bowie knives, they were a law unto themselves, the antithesis to the “peace, order and good government” policy of the British colonial system.
Alfred Waddington’s initial impression of Victoria was that it was “a quiet village of about 800 inhabitants. No noise, no bustle, no gamblers, no speculators or interested parties to preach up this or underrate that.” The well-behaved residents lived in seclusion, “as it were, from the whole world.” Their reaction to the invasion of gold-obsessed Californians was therefore predictable. Emerging from church on April 25, 1858, Dr. Helmcken wrote, they “were astonished to find a steamer entering the harbour from San Francisco.” The Commodore disembarked 450 men, all heavily equipped for mining and carrying knives and guns. Waddington observed that the churchgoers “beheld these varied specimens of humanity streaming down in motley crowds from the steamers and sailing vessels . . . in silent amazement, as if contemplating a second eruption of the barbarians!”
On April 25, 1858, the Commodore disembarked 450 eager, fevered pursuers of gold, much to the astonished dismay of Victoria’s residents.
While some Californian prospectors came overland from the south, Victoria bore the brunt of the influx of gold seekers. In fact, so many made their way north that the San Francisco press lamented the lost labourers and the subsequent damage to the Californian economy: “The desire to emigrate is fast increasing. . . . Several hundreds have left in the past fortnight and many more are preparing to leave.”
To this point, the two British colonies on the northern Pacific coast — Vancouver Island and New Caledonia — were largely unknown to the wider world. Only very recently had the British navy transferred the site of its Pacific operations from Valparaiso in the southern Pacific to Esquimalt, and that was only because it needed a base closer to the Russian port of Vladivostok once the Crimean War broke out. The area was chiefly the domain of the various First Nations, although the Hudson’s Bay Company had built a chain of trading posts across the north that connected to southern forts in Kamloops, Langley, and Hope.
And, of course, Fort Victoria. Established in 1842, after the loss of territory in the Oregon Treaty, it was a rough settlement with a bastion on its southwest corner and a series of wooden structures. Its inhabitants were all connected to the HBC and the eight hundred people living there were the usual mix — Scottish officers, Canadiens, Métis, and a few Kanakas (Hawaiians).
Hospital Point, Esquimalt Harbour, Vancouver Island, was “picturesquely rock-bound.” Early arrivals found it “crowded with gracefully peaked canoes and boats of all shapes and sizes”: Kinahan Cornwallis.
The Bastion, Government Street, Victoria, 1858.
The newcomers built a tent city around the fort and shopped for provisions. Prices for everyday basics, such as flour, soared, and the influx of miners transformed Victoria into a busy commercial centre, as described by Waddington: “Shops, stores and wooden shanties of every description were now seen going up and nothing was to be heard but the stroke of the chisel or hammer. In six weeks, 225 buildings, of which nearly 200 were stores . . . had been added to the village of 800 inhabitants.”
Few miners, however, allowed themselves the luxury of observing such effects. They were desperate to reach the goldfields, and the next stage of their trip required some means of transport across the Strait of Georgia to the Fraser River. They left in whatever watercraft they could find — steamers, sailboats, or canoes — and if they couldn’t find anything, they built their own “punty, awkward-looking things, about as good imitations of coffins as anything else.” Consequently, many perished. Today, the journey takes one hundred minutes by public ferry. In 1858, it was a two-day trip, requiring an overnight stop on one of the Gulf Islands, such as Miner’s Bay on Mayne Island.
Bustling Victoria Harbour, August 1858 — “a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, bids fair, on account of its position with regard to the gold fields . . . speedily to become a large town”: Illustrated London News.
But once the prospectors reached the mainland they discovered their difficulties had only just begun. The Fraser quickly narrowed into a swiftly flowing river and exacted its own death toll. As Governor Douglas reported to London: